1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computing station communicating across a network, such as the Internet, for information or data to be downloaded from another computing system on the network. More particularly, the invention relates to the creation of dynamic link labels which are programmatic constructs having behavior resembling hyper links within a web page.
2. Description of Related Art
Computers or electronic devices which access information over a network, such as the Internet, generally utilize a software interface which permits the user to direct the operation of the computer in obtaining information from the network. In the case of the Internet, a network browser program is conventionally utilized as an interface which both provides the user with controls over navigating the network and displays on the user's computer information derived from the network.
Information displayed in the browser is provided by various "web sites" from various locations in the network, and is generally displayed as pages in the browser. This information can generally include text, graphics, sound files, video files, and other data. Included in the textual data obtained from the network and displayed in a browser page are labels, conventionally known as hyper links. These hyper links are associated with URL (Uniform Resource Locator) addresses which point to other locations of information in the network.
A user navigates through the network by selecting a hyper link, or label, displayed in the browser, and the browser then loads the corresponding URL and downloads the web page or other data associated therewith.
In conventional Internet and networking systems, the association between the labels displayed in a browser page and the corresponding URL address is static. In other words, for a given label displayed in a browser page, there is a corresponding URL which has already been assigned in the particular web page design and is fixedly associated to the label. Once a conventional web page has been downloaded from the Internet to the user's computer, the URL address corresponding to a given label does not change. This is primarily due to the fact that conventional HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) pages do not have dynamic characteristics.
Furthermore, due to the static nature of conventional web pages, the textual content of each label is also static.
Because of the static nature of both the textual content of and the URL addresses associated with conventional labels and hyper links, web pages are not capable of adapting to or changing in response to the user's inputs to the browser page. Conventional web pages merely detect the selection of a hyper link, and load the URL address associated with the hyper link.
With conventional web pages, the label is downloaded as a static portion of the entire static web page. Therefore, if a designer of a web page is desirous of placing a label whose textual content or URL destination address changes in response to user input, a series of network transmissions between the remote computing station and the web site would be required. Depending on the network, the associated network access time can be characterized as having some amount of latency.